Climate Change Buffoons

The End is Coming

We have been treated to a plethora of doomsday announcements in the media over the past weeks. The occasion was a gathering of "scientists" in Copenhagen in order to increase political pressure upon the UN Global Warming conference to be held in that city later this year.

These modern-day flat earthers, complete with their breathless Chicken-Little siren songs, are becoming just far too predictable. It is hard to keep everybody at the fever pitch of crisis-alarm all the time, and the poor old flat earthers are starting to feel the load.

So, out come some even more histrionic and extreme pronouncements. It is ever worse that we thought, folks. Yes. It is.

So, for those of you who like the horror genre, satiate yourselves on the following:


Toxic Sea:

But a failure or fudge at Copenhagen risks dissipating the momentum built up over a number of years, and there may not be another chance. Hence the increasingly extreme rhetoric from the activists. The latest examples include, for instance, an almost hysterical article in last weekend's Sunday Times headlined "the toxic sea", in which we are warned that the oceans are being turned into "acidified soups" and that we will have to mourn the "tiny marine organisms dissolving in acidified water". The horror story suggests that ocean pH could go as low as 7.3 (from its current approximately 8.1) by 2300. In reality, this means going from very mildly alkaline to just on the alkaline side of neutral (pH 7). Acidified soup? I think not.

One Hundred Months

Prince Charles has chimed in. He has stentoriously informed the world that we only have one hundred months left to save the plant.

Existential in Nature

Here's a beauty. The papers presented at Copenhagen apparently show that climate change is far worse than we feared. It is "existential in its nature and all consuming in its scope . . ." Whoooo. Feel the goose bumps. The full skinny goes on:

The impact of climate change, existential in its nature and all consuming in its scope, will be far more severe and felt far earlier than previously thought.

The latest scientific research presented at this week's meeting of climate scientists in Copenhagen confirms what many had privately feared: we are on track for the worst case scenario set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change two years ago, and the instabilities in the climate system coupled with the fact that many natural carbon sinks are beginning to fail mean that it could be worse still.

All the latest climate science suggests global average temperatures are rising in line with expectations, but carbon emissions are rising faster than anticipated and natural systems are responding more dramatically than expected to even modest temperature rises.

For example, sea levels have risen an average of 3mm a year since 1993, an increase of 50 per cent on the average rate of sea level increase during the 20th century. The rise is faster than expected because previous models failed to anticipate the rate at which glaciers would move into the sea. Based on the current trends sea levels will not rise by between 18cm and 59cm by 2100 as predicted by the IPCC, but by more than one metre putting a tenth of the global population at risk of coastal flooding.

Similarly, new evidence reveals that the world's major carbon sinks, the tropical rainforest, Siberian permafrost and the oceans, are all much more sensitive to even small average temperature increases than previously thought. According to one model a temperature increase of just two degrees would result in 20 to 40 per cent of the Amazon dying off, releasing yet more CO2 into the atmosphere. The worst case scenario predictions that rising temperatures will result in more warming gases being released triggering runaway climate change are already being realised.

All this means that we are currently on track for warming of around five to six degrees by the end of the century. (Italics, ours)

But wait, there's more. Copenhagen has said its worse.

That might sound like hyperbole, but at five to six degrees warmer vast swathes of the tropical and sub tropical regions would become uninhabitable, sea levels would rise by at least a metre putting coastal cities and entire countries at risk of inundation, the rainforests would be effectively wiped out, acidification of the oceans would create giant dead zones, and mass migration would spark near unprecedented levels of global conflict. One scientist predicted the global population could crash to just one billion people - between 2050 and 2100 the world could be literally decimated.

And the really scary thing is that most previous climate studies have been far too optimistic in their predictions. This time, if they are even half right we are on a path towards utter devastation. (Italics, ours)

Utter devastation, huh. Now you have got our attention.

Ok, so let's not get technical, but what is happening here is a few measurements taken recently of sea levels or melting ice has been put into those pesky models, and projected out for a hundred years--and what do you know--calamity, doom, death, and destruction. The end is coming.

Oh, we have an idea. It has been recently reported in the Edmonton Journal that fourteen weather stations on Alberta have recorded their lowest readings since records began in 1880.

This past Tuesday, Edmonton International Airport reported an overnight low of -41.5 C, smashing the previous March low of -29.4 C set in 1975. Records just don't fall by that much, but the airport's did. Records are usually broken fractions of degrees. The International's was exceeded by 12 degrees.

To give you an example of how huge is the difference between the old record and the new, if Edmonton were to exceed its highest-ever summer temperature by the same amount, the high here some July day would have to reach 50 C. That's a Saudi Arabia-like temperature.

OK, let's do a "Copenhagen" and put that little bit of data in our models, and project it out a hundred years. Doom. Doom. The end is nigh. We are all going to freeze to death.

Geo-Engineering

You know things have to be real bad when even the Royal Society gets involved and is prepared to plan for "geo-engineering". No! No! Not that! Not geo-engineering! Yes.

Ok, so what is geo-engineering. Simply put, it is mad scientists at work, having to do mad things because desperate times call for desperate measures.

It means artificial trees and ships spraying droplets into the air. We kid you not. So passes the Royal Society.

The threat of devastating climate change is now so great that some scientists say it is time to investigate a Plan B - geo-engineering on a planetary scale.

Such methods of altering the world’s climate may become necessary, they say, unless emissions of greenhouse gases fall within five years.

Which is certainly not going to happen. So geo-engineering it is, then.

Ideas that were once the realm of science fiction - such as creating artificial trees to absorb carbon dioxide, or reflecting sunlight away from the Earth - are coming under serious scrutiny as temperatures and CO2 emissions continue to rise. The issue has become so pressing that the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, is preparing a report on the feasibility of geo-engineering.

Professor John Shepherd, chairman of the working group, said: “Our study aims to separate the science from the science fiction and offer recommendations on which options deserve serious consideration.”

The report is not yet complete but the personal view of Professor Brian Launder, one of its contributors, is that without CO2 reductions or geo-engineering, “civilisation as we know it will end within our grandchildren’s lifetime”.

Oh, no--civilisation is going to end. Our poor grandchildren.

Professor Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University is investigating how ships could spray droplets of sea water into the atmosphere where they would evaporate, leaving tiny salt crystals to rise on air currents into the clouds.

The crystals would act as “nuclei” around which water vapour could condense and thus increase the reflective power of the clouds, bouncing more of the sun’s energy back into space. But critics warn that although such schemes might lower temperatures swiftly, they would have to be maintained for long periods and the side-effects are unknown.

Oh, but then comes the big clanger. Wait for it. There are dangers lurking here.

Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: “Anything that alters the climate in a different way from reducing carbon has inherent dangers because we don’t understand the climate well enough.”

Say, what! We don't understand the climate well enough. But apparently well enough to be absolutely rock solid, one hundred percent gold plated certain that CO2 is causing global warming. How pathetic are these people. They profess certain impeccable knowledge and profound ignorance of the same thing at the same time, and still expect to be treated with respect.

Well folks, its OK because the good old climate flat-earthers are not going to sit idly by. They are planning to beef up their propaganda campaign. Here's an insight into their latest thinking:

To give us the slightest chance of avoiding catastropic levels of climate change we need a far greater sense of urgency than has been displayed to date. Political and business leaders need to act, and they need to act now.

To this end, the scientific, political and business community need to instigate an immediate change in the terminology they are using to describe global warming. Environmental campaigner George Monbiot's suggestion this week that we should substitute the passive "climate change" for the more accurate "climate breakdown" might seem like a semantic side issue, but if adopted widely enough it could have a huge impact.

Well, knock me down with a feather. First it was "global warming" but the clever chappies worked out that you could not rely on the temperatures rising all the time. So they changed the rubric to "climate change"--which worked well for a time because everything that happened in the climate constituted change of one kind or another, and was good for a headline. But after a while that wore a bit thin, since climate is changing all the time, so---- so what? Now, a new rubric. Climate breakdown! Sounds like a professional wresting show. Yup that's it. A huge impact is coming.

These people are propagandists pure and simple. They are a disgrace to professional science. They are the flat earthers of our day. They are beneath contempt. As are all the politicians and leaders who trot supinely and mindlessly in their train.